You can call me a blasphemer if you like, but I didn’t like Resident
Evil. Maybe I just didn’t get it. Maybe I wasn’t able to see past the fact
that this was an early game on the Sony Playstation console, as the graphics and
sound were definitely dated. I couldn’t identify with the plot, I was extremely
annoyed by the game loading between rooms, and I found the inventory system cumbersome.
I do give it credit for jump-starting the horror game genre, but that’s about
all.

Wait
a minute here … you might be asking yourself why I’m discussing Resident
Evil in the Galerians review. The answer to that question is very simple:
I found Galerians to be a cheap ripoff of Resident Evil, retaining
all of the elements I couldn’t stand and adding very little of interest. Although
I disliked Resident Evil, I would rather play it for weeks than spend one
more minute playing Galerians. It really is that bad.

What’s Going
on Here?

If there’s a high point for Galerians, it’s the plot–but
given the ratings in the other sections, that’s not saying much. In the game,
you play Rion, a young teenage boy who wakes up in a hospital with no memory of
the atrocities that have happened to him. Through the miracle of technology, you
have been given psionic powers, which can be recharged by using injectable vials.
Your goal is to use these powers to escape the hospital, discover your past, and
stop Dorothy (an artificially intelligent supercomputer) from populating the world
with her slaves. The game does a fair job of telling the story through flashbacks,
interactions with other characters, and documents found scattered around different
locales. Unfortunately, any enthusiasm for the story that I might have felt was
extinguished within 30 minutes of starting the game, due to the miserable gameplay.

Overall
Plot Grade: B

How Did it Sound?

In a word, annoying. The
in-game music, which varies slightly depending on your location, is just plain
boring. It tries to be dark and techno-menacing, but all it made me want to do
was turn down the volume. The in-game sound effects are another thing entirely;
all of the locations seem extremely quiet, except for the sounds of your footsteps,
which seem unnaturally loud. At least walking on wood sounds differently than
walking on metal or grass.

Of course, there are also the battle noises.
Once you play Galerians, you’ll fondly remember the lovely sound of Rion
screaming and groaning as he shorts out. I found one of the “bosses”
that you must beat to finish a level so irritating that I literally muted the
sound, and it didn’t seem to affect the game very much, if at all. The power indicator
on your psionic attack is at least at the correct volume.

The
only other sound of note in the game is for inventory manipulation. The beep made
when navigating your inventory is absolutely ridiculous–far too loud and grating.
A final note–the introductory movie/theme song is a repetitive epilepsy-inducing
festival of techno mixed with vomiting noises. Very nice.

Overall Sound
Grade: D+

How Did it Look?

After the recent successes of
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Fear Effect, it is apparent that
developers have taken the Playstation platform to the next level with respect
to graphics. Galerians, however, remains firmly entrenched in mediocrity,
with the exception of the movie sequences–but I’ll get to that momentarily. Character
movement is fairly pixelated, and to my untrained eye, looks worse than the characters
in the first Resident Evil. The environments your character walks through
seem strangely empty, and they lack detail from every angle.

With respect
to the movie sequences, there was obviously some effort put into them–the animation
is smooth, and the backgrounds are representative of the gloomy atmosphere of
the game. There are problems, though, with the believability of these movies–for
example, during one of Rion’s flashback sequences, his mother is showing him a
“beautiful” ring on her hand. No problem there … except that she’s
wearing the ring directly over one of her knuckles. This may be nitpicking, but
it seems to me that with the hours of time spent putting these movies together,
someone should have noticed that, since the hand is the only thing on the
screen! I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed these tiny inconsistencies if the game
had been any fun at all, but that’s where this game really falls down–see the
next section.

Overall Graphics Grade: C-

Was it Fun?

Playing
Galerians is like chewing on aluminum foil. I have never played a game
that was as lacking in fun as this one.

While
playing Galerians, there are three status bars in the upper right corner
of the screen. The top bar represents hit points, the bottom bar represents your
stock of active psionic power, and the middle bar represents your “Aggression
Points.” The drugs you inject to combat the bad guys in the game cause your
aggression to increase–once it hits maximum, you “short out,” with
two effects. The first effect is that the regular enemies in the game are hit
with a massive psionic blast, causing their heads to explode, or at the very least
instant death. The second effect, the consequence of this mental drain, is that
your hit points begin to drop until you take a dose of your favorite calming drug,
Delmetor. Delmetor is not in very plentiful supply, so if you short out without
a stash of Delmetor, you’re toast. This gimmick would be very successful except
for a very critical problem–while exploring your surroundings, your Aggression
Points continue to increase, regardless of what you are doing. This added time
constraint, to put it simply, is the reason this game is terrible. When I play
a game, I like to explore my surroundings, taking my time to notice the hard work
by the developers–but in order to win this game, you have to rush through it.
Who cares about the story, or the characters, for that matter–you better hurry,
pal, or else you’ll die.

What’s the problem with hurrying? Well, at your
standard walking speed, there’s no possible way to finish this game. I could crawl
faster than Rion walks. You can run, by holding down one of the control buttons,
but with this added speed comes a lack of control. Turning Rion while running
is like turning a large truck–he requires a pretty significant turning radius.
The only problem with running everywhere is the delay between rooms. Open a door,
wait ten seconds. To climb stairs, you must press the action button (just like
RE) and another ten seconds are gone. In fact, I think the time between
rooms is even slower than in Resident Evil, and I didn’t think that was
possible. Playing this game is an alternating sequence of “hurry up”
and “wait for load” interrupting any sense of urgency and replacing
it with irritation.

Galerians did fix one of the most irritating
problems with RE, the limited inventory–but only for regular items and
keys. It’s true that you have unlimited space for documents, pictures, keys, and
other items of interest while you’re exploring, but there is still a limitation
on the number of drugs and tablets you can carry. Come on, Crave, that’s ridiculous.
I can carry four large pieces of metal without any problems, but when it comes
to one more little pill, I don’t have any more room. It follows, therefore, that
even if I’ve just found enough Delmetor to keep me going for another half an hour,
I have to come back to the room to pick it up later because my medicine pouch
is full of psionic attack drugs.

Oh
yes, I almost forgot! For the sake of example, let’s assume that you have the
key to open a particular office. During your explorations, you find a door, and
when you try to open it, the only message you receive is, “This door is locked.”
The key you found is not automatically used when you walk up to the door–you
must specifically select the key and use it on the door. What if you don’t know
that this room is the office that matches the key? Too bad. The object manipulation
system in Galerians is pitiful. How about another example? Walk up to a computer
terminal, press Action, and the game tells you, “There is a computer terminal
here.” You have to use Action a second time to access the terminal.
I walked away from a number of critical game objects, thinking that my efforts
were sufficient to activate them, when in fact, another Action press was still
necessary.

There was one feature that I found intriguing–in addition to
psionic attack powers, Rion has the ability to “scan” different objects
during the course of the game. If you are missing a key for a door, scanning the
door will give you a hint as to where that key can be found. If a door is unlocked,
scanning it will give you a preview of the upcoming room. Scanning objects that
you find during your exploration will sometimes reveal in-game movies that more
fully explain the storyline. Once I discovered this, I began to scan everything
to explore the plot, but stopped shortly thereafter–scanning objects increases
your Aggression Points, so the lack of Delmetor forced me to be very selective
in my scanning.

Galerians does have some reasonably interesting puzzles,
but given the time constraint I mentioned above, it becomes necessary to solve
each puzzle twice–take the time to figure it out the first time, reload, and
then rush through the process you went through the first time as fast as possible
to conserve Delmetor. Solving the puzzles twice becomes two times too many. Add
to this mix the fact that the “bosses” are far too difficult, and you
know exactly why I used a walkthrough for the majority of the game–let someone
else figure out the fastest way to finish each stage so I don’t have to replay
long segments of it. Crave/Ascii advertises on the outer packaging of Galerians
that there are 50+ hours of gameplay. They neglect to mention that 15 of those
hours are spent replaying sections you’ve already explored, and 10 of those hours
are spent waiting for rooms to load.

Overall Gameplay Grade: F

There
is no possible way that I could recommend this game to any adventure gamer. Since
there are some mature themes, as well as graphic violence, in this game, it’s
definitely not for the kids. The gameplay was enough for this adult to toss it
into the recycle bin. I think I’ll replay Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver or
Zork Nemesis to wash the bad taste of Galerians out of my mouth.

Final
Grade: D